Church Leaders - Stop Calling AI Inevitable

It's not how this works

I’m seeing it pretty much every week now.

Someone in my social circles will respond to someone else who is fearful of AI or making a bold stand for abstinence from generative AI with a phrase that feels like it’s been fine-tuned by AI itself:

Just get used to it — AI is inevitable.

It’s gotten so ubiquitous that I read that even George Lucas said it recently in an interview.

But here’s the thing… if you consider yourself a church leader, then you have to stop spreading this propagandistic line of thought. Frankly, it’s antithetical to Christian thought.

I don’t hold it against you for saying it — the concept itself is everywhere. But I don’t think that it means what you think it means. Or at least it’s not coming across the way you think it is.

Every time I hear someone say AI is inevitable, I don’t hear a claim about technology.

I hear a confession: I don’t want to take the time to think about this. I just want the benefits. Now. Without the homework.

That’s what “inevitable” is doing in that sentence.

It’s not a description. It’s a maneuver. It’s a clever diversion from the hard work we’re called to. Say a thing is inevitable and you’ve closed the conversation before anyone had to open it. You’ve made resistance look quaint… like the guy still griping about horse-and-buggy people while the automobile rolls past him. In reality, the one avoiding the issue isn’t the one reticent to AI, but the inconsiderate AI advocate.

What the Word Is Actually For

Watch what “inevitable” gets used to end. It’s almost never a genuine technical debate — throughput, latency, whatever the engineers actually argue about.

The general conversation happening online isn’t between scientists working with code. It’s just people, trying to understand. And what people are seeing when they look at the world of AI is scandal, manipulation, harm, partisan politicking, and lots of money being moved around.

So, of course, they don’t need to be told that technology will progress. Yeah, we all saw Blockbuster close down. We all saw the cable cutters switch to Netflix. We know how tech works. They aren’t posting online about AI because they want to debate with you the merits of the technology.

What they are offering in these posts is concern. It’s fear. It’s the pastor in the back of the room who’s not sure what this does to the kid who now writes his youth group testimony with a chatbot, or the associate minister wondering what happens to a congregation’s trust in her sermon once everyone assumes half of it came from a prompt.

“Inevitable” doesn’t answer those questions. It skips them. Ignores them. It tells the person holding them that their hesitation is already obsolete, so why bother voicing it.

I don’t think that’s usually malicious. I think it’s tired. Thinking hard about a new tool while also running a church is exhausting, and “inevitable” is a very efficient shortcut past the exhaustion. You get to keep the convenience without doing the discernment.

Who We’re Actually Talking To

Here’s the part I keep coming back to, and it’s the part I think we’re forgetting: we’re not tech reporters.

We’re pastors, planters, staff, laity — people who define ourselves, publicly, as having a better way. A more important way. If that claim means anything at all, it has to survive contact with a hype cycle.

AI is not more inevitable than the Divine.

Say that next to each other, and it sounds almost too obvious to write down, and yet look at how we’re actually behaving. We’re adopting tools at a pace and with a level of unreflection we would never extend to a doctrinal shift, a new worship format, a building fund, or even the carpet color. We interrogate those. We form task forces for those. For this, we shrug and say, well, it’s inevitable. That just can’t be the way forward.

The call to love God and love neighbor is not negotiable in the way a software roadmap is negotiable. It doesn’t get sunset. It doesn’t have a beta period where the ethics get worked out later once adoption numbers look good.

Our call to love is more inevitable than anything Silicon Valley has ever shipped, and it was true before the first server rack existed and will be true after the last one is in a scrap heap. Every perk anyone is chasing with AI right now — efficiency, reach, a sermon drafted in a fraction of the time — has to answer to that call. Not the other way around.

The Homework Isn’t Optional

I’m not writing this to tell you AI is bad, or good, or anything in between. I’m telling you that “inevitable” is not a theological category, and the moment you let it stand in for one, you’ve quietly consented to let a product roadmap set the terms for something that belongs to God.

So next time you hear yourself reach for the word inevitable, stop and ask what you’re actually trying to avoid thinking about. Because it’s probably not the technology. It’s probably the harder, slower, more vital work sitting right behind it.